‘If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you’ve never spent a sleepless night with a single mosquito.’ So runs a saying we learned while living in India. Tiny things punch way above their weight. And a virus is a lot smaller than a mosquito.
In fact, viruses are among the smallest life forms on our planet. Somewhere between 20–400 nanometres, 100 times smaller than bacteria, and too small to see even with a normal microscope. You’ll need an electron microscope to spot a coronavirus, or Covid-19, as we must now call it, like somebody out of Star Wars. But what an impact that infinitesimally small organism has made!
In the space of a few weeks – and with our help of course – it has circled the globe, shut down whole cities and humbled whole countries. Economies are stalling, stocks falling, businesses struggling, travel disrupted, sports events cancelled, many lives lost and many more put on hold, holidays ending in virtual imprisonment… the list goes on. It really is staggering that something so tiny can have such devastatingly vast consequences.
